In designing for engagement at a public multi-touch installation, we identified supporting multiple users and allowing for gradual discovery as challenges. In this paper, we present Worlds of Information, a multi-touch application featuring 3D Worlds, which provide access to different content. These 3D widgets gradually unfold and allow for temporal navigation of multimedia in parallel, while also providing a 2D plane where media can be shared. We report on a field trial at an exhibition using questionnaires and video ethnography. We studied engagement through questions adapted from Flow, Presence and Intrinsic Motivation questionnaires, which showed that users, overall, had a positive and social experience with the installation. The worlds effectively invited multiple users and provided for parallel interaction. While functionality was discovered gradually through social learning, the study demonstrates the challenges of designing multi-touch applications for walk-up-and-use displays.

To understand how implicit and explicit biofeedback work in games, we developed a first-person shooter (FPS) game to experiment with different biofeedback techniques. While this area has seen plenty of discussion, there is little rigorous experimentation addressing how biofeedback can enhance human-computer interaction. In our two-part study, (N=36) subjects first played eight different game stages with two implicit biofeedback conditions, with two simulation-based comparison and repetition rounds, then repeated the two biofeedback stages when given explicit information on the biofeedback. The biofeedback conditions were respiration and skin-conductance (EDA) adaptations. Adaptation targets were four balanced player avatar attributes. We collected data with psycho¬physiological measures (electromyography, respiration, and EDA), a game experience questionnaire, and game-play measures.

Recently, multimodal and affective technologies have been adopted to support expressive and engaging interaction, bringing up a plethora of new research questions. Among the challenges, two essential topics are 1) how to devise truly multimodal systems that can be used seamlessly for customized performance and content generation, and 2) how to utilize the tracking of emotional cues and respond to them in order to create affective interaction loops. We present PuppetWall, a multi-user, multimodal system intended for digitally augmented puppeteering. This application allows natural interaction to control puppets and manipulate playgrounds comprising background, props, and puppets. PuppetWall utilizes hand movement tracking, a multi-touch display and emotion speech recognition input for interfacing. Here we document the technical features of the system and an initial evaluation. The evaluation involved two professional actors and also aimed at exploring naturally emerging expressive speech categories. We conclude by summarizing challenges in tracking emotional cues from acoustic features and their relevance for the design of affective interactive systems.

This paper presents a novel way of using real-time heart rate information to control a physically interactive biathlon (skiing and shooting) computer game. Instead of interfacing the game to an exercise bike or other equipment with speed output, the skiing speed is directly proportional to heart rate. You can freely choose the form of physical exercise, which makes it easier for people with different skill levels and backgrounds to play together. The system can be used with any exercise machine or form. To make playing meaningful instead of simply exercising as hard as you can, a high heart rate impedes the shooting part of the game by making the sight less steady. This balancing mechanism lets the player try out different tactics, varying from very slow skiing and sharp shooting to fast skiing and random shooting. The game has been evaluated in a user study with eight participants. The results show that heart rate interaction is fun and usable interaction method.

The authors introduce a general-purpose procedure for image segmentation which combines iterative image enhancement by a symmetric neighborhood filter (SNF) with an iterative, hierarchical connected component (HCC) analysis. Color vector versions of both SNF and HCC are developed, using two common kinds of metrics applied to color vector intensity differences-a simple Euclidean-type metric and a coordinate maximum-type metric. The segmentation procedures are illustrated with three-band color images of indoor and outdoor scenes.>